l these, allowing for everything
else that can be adduced in their favor, we cannot help returning to the
position that plain girls have an up-hill battle to fight. No doubt it
ought not to be so.

Cynics tell us that six months after a man is married it makes very
little difference to him whether his wife's nose is Roman, aquiline, or
retrousse; and this may be so. The unfortunate thing is that most men
persist in marrying for the sake of the illusion of the first six
months, and under the influence of the ante-nuptial and not the
post-nuptial sentiments; and as the first six months with a plain girl
are confessedly inferior in attraction, the inference is clear that they
do in effect attract less. Plainness or loveliness apart, a very large
number of womankind have no reason to expect any very happy chance in
married life; and if marriage is to be set before all women as the one
ideal, a number of feminine lives will always turn out to have been
failures.

It may be said that it is hopeless to attempt on this point to alter the
sentiments of the female sex, or indeed the general verdict of society.
We do not quite see the hopelessness. A considerable amount of the
matrimonial ideas of young women are purely the result of their
education, and of the atmosphere in which they have been brought up;
and, by giving a new direction to their early training, it might not be
altogether so quixotical to believe that we should alter all that is the
result of the training. At any rate it has become essential for the
welfare of women that they should, as far as possible, be taught that
they may have a career open to them even if they never marry; and it is
the duty of society to try to open to them as many careers of the sort
as are not incompatible with the distinctive peculiarities of a woman's
physical capacity.

It may well be that society's present instincts as regards woman are at
bottom selfish. The notion of feminine dependence on man, of the want of
refinement in a woman who undertakes any active business or profession,
and of the first importance of woman's domestic position, when carried
to an extreme, are perhaps better suited to the caprice and fanciful
fastidiousness of men than to the real requirements, in the present age,
of the other sex. The throng of semi-educated authoresses who are now
flocking about the world of letters is a wholesome protest against such
exclusive jealousy. The real objection to literary w